Blasting the Future

A timely and fascinating look at the impact of Futurism on the British avant-garde.The works illustrated are from a range of prominent public and private collections, and many of them have rarely been exhibited.The time is ripe for a fundamental reassessment of the impact that Futurism had on British culture and of Vorticism, the specifically British avant-garde movement inspired by the founder of the Italian Futurist movement, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.This book, which accompanied an...
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A timely and fascinating look at the impact of Futurism on the British avant-garde.The works illustrated are from a range of prominent public and private collections, and many of them have rarely been exhibited.The time is ripe for a fundamental reassessment of the impact that Futurism had on British culture and of Vorticism, the specifically British avant-garde movement inspired by the founder of the Italian Futurist movement, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.This book, which accompanied an exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, combines new material and recent research to provide an illuminating and coherent overview of Vorticism before, during and immediately after the First World War.The exhibition is the first major showing of the movement since 1974 and the accompanying book illustrates works in a wide range of media by England's only Futurist, C.R.W. Nevinson,and by the core of artists associated with Vorticism: Wyndham Lewis; Edward Wadsworth; Frederick Etchells; William Roberts; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; Jacob Epstein, and Jacob Kramer. The influence exerted on these artists by the Italian Futurists Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the mercurial impresario of Futurism, Marinetti, is fully explored.